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A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

nytimes.com

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Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#181

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

sleepychu wrote: post #98
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #95

This does create the illusion of just in time salads, but how is it different from prepackaged salads? I assume such a machine in large sits in every salad factory.

Configurability? I want that sald with this topping Freshness? If the buisiness is preparing the vegetables in the kitchen before providing them to the machine then the salads might taste fresher than factory packaged salads >1 day old.

I'd want to know the "refresh" schedule for the ingredients. If the machine gets new veg every Tuesday then that's the best day for a really fresh salad. I would hope the location is high enough traffic to justify daily ingredient changes.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#182

Post by astrodust »

jamesrcole wrote: post #120
j7ake wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is no theory linking interaction of molecules to flavour yet, although there are some preliminary work from some labs on this (with beer)

I said "eventually". Are you saying it will never be possible?

Never is a long time, but it's also a theroetical.

The sun will eventually engulf the Earth rendering this argument irreelvant.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#183

Post by busterarm »

snappyTertle wrote: post #161

Robots making food will lower the cost of food, giving more people access to better nutrition. This will also free up labor and capital to do other things. Machines helped make farming more productive so humans no longer have to live on farms, and dedicate their lives to the next meal on their table. If we were worried about jobs back then, we would've outlawed tractors and other machines. If we really want to create…

I'm skeptical. This is painfully slow and handles 1 person at a time.

Any midtown/downtown NY salad bar can turnover 10 peoples' salads in the time this machine took to make 1. There's no way this machine's operating cost is better than that. Sure, you could scale up these machines, but then the human-staffed salad bars are winning on floor space (and rent). It looks like you could only fit 2-3 of these machines in the footprint of the average NY salad spot.

The only place this might win is where salad consumption is infrequent, in which case for food safety reasons, you probably don't want to be eating the salad there anyway.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#184

Post by wavefunction »

jo909 wrote: post #121
wiz21c wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add that if a bad cook can make an average salad, it doesn't make any easier to accept the fact that we make robots which can barely do better. In other words, instead of replacing the cook by a machine, we should train him to cook better. And we should train people to make the difference between a soulless dish and a good one. (I cook for myself and I can assure you that a machine can't cook; it can assemble…

The creativity has to happen at the "design" stage. The best restaurants strive for perfect _repeatable_ dishes, and no cook has to improvise with spices or ingredients on a normal shift.

A good cook/chef can take a look at an ingredient or set of ingredients and vary their techniques to produce that 'repeatable' dish.

I think you're completely discounting what cooking involves when it's someone with skill and experience, and that's unfortunate.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#185

Post by tw1010 »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #95

This does create the illusion of just in time salads, but how is it different from prepackaged salads? I assume such a machine in large sits in every salad factory.

I think the customization aspect is overrated. In a blind taste test I bet prepackaged salads and hand made ones would fare about as well. Just like how cheap and expensive wine are indistinguishable under a blindfold. And that's what's so funny about this story. Two hundred years ago all salads were hand made. Then we invented machines to automate it. But then automated food got a somewhat arbitrary and unjustified stigma about it, which allowed for hand made salads to become a thing again. Similar to how an artificial social stigma was constructed against "fake" furr, in preference to animal furr. There is virtually no visual difference, but rich people wanted to maintain the signaling-value of the more expensive "real" furr and did so by sneering at the cheap-to-manufacture fake stuff, which propagated out in the rest of society in the form of adverts and the like.

And of course the same thing will happen here too. Now robots can make "hand made" caesar salads. But eventually the same social constructions will be created against that and in preference to man-made "hand crafted" caesar salads. Under a blind taste test man-made and robot-made foods will be indistinguishable but without the blindfold there will be enough culture and clever rethoric created to trick the senses, and we'll be back to where we were a few years ago.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#186

Post by dsego »

jon_richards wrote: post #104
christopheml wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough? When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.

Horses used to be used for practically everything. The first commercial steam engine pumped water from mines and was measured in "horsepower", the the rate at which a horse could continuously pump water. Then steam engines replaced freight hauling. Then personal transport. Don't see many working horses now.

In Pursuit of Honor (1995)

> The movie follows the plight of the officers as they attempt to save the animals that the Army no longer needs as it modernizes toward a mechanized military.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113399/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Pursuit_of_Honor

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#187

Post by LeifCarrotson »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #179
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because it's way, way cheaper and more flexible to use a touchscreen PLC, like one of these: https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/Shopping/Catalog/HMI_(H... than a huge mess of buttons and wires. Just look at that linked product! Less than $500 and you have as many buttons and labels as you can shake a stick at, and it's all behind a pretty color display. I can hardly buy 3 buttons, a vinyl overlay, and pay for…

>Less than $500 and you have as many buttons and labels as you can shake a stick at, and it's all behind a pretty color display. A raspberry pi + touchscreen is 1/5th of that. RPi is capable of running Qt5 which would be a solid UI choice. How the heck have they survived?

A few reasons: Because a Raspberry Pi and Ebay touchscreen won't be running or supported in 20 years, while the PLC will. The IO on a Pi needs optoisolators and hardening that's built into the PLC, and it needs soldering, while the touchscreen has built-in screw terminals. And while the software sucks, anyone remotely competent can go from zero knowledge to bumble into a working, sturdy product on the PLC in perhaps 80 hours. Qt has a much steeper learning curve.

Essentially, the touchscreen is an RPi and touchscreen, plus some industrial enclosure, strengthening, and connectors all wrapped up into a product. That integration is definitely worth $400. Or, if you want the name brand stuff, the Allen Bradley version of the same will set you back another $2000.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#188

Post by Adamantcheese »

Is it just me or does reading what basically boils down to "Don't go outside, eat this premade salad and 'boost your productivity'" sound somewhat depressing? I don't think that being inside all day eating low quality food under fluorescent lights is going to boost my productivity at all. I would honestly want to go to a restaurant and get an actual salad at lunch.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#189

Post by jpindar »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #146
vortico wrote: post #88

Why is the UI on these things so atrocious? It took him a number of key presses just to select from a list of 6 and many more to finalize the purchase. Why not have a bunch of large tactile buttons at the bottom of the screen like all normal vending machines do? I don't want to wait in line for 3 minutes while some technophobe tries to figure out how to nagivate a pressure touchscreen with 12 menus deep. It's not his…

It's because it's way, way cheaper and more flexible to use a touchscreen PLC, like one of these: https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/Shopping/Catalog/HMI_(H... than a huge mess of buttons and wires. Just look at that linked product! Less than $500 and you have as many buttons and labels as you can shake a stick at, and it's all behind a pretty color display. I can hardly buy 3 buttons, a vinyl overlay, and pay for…

Oooh, that is a nice one.
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